You are obviously very misinformed. Windows is incredably stable, and has been since Vista onwards. Also, Microsoft has many open source projects. The entirety of ASP.NET is open source. They own CodePlex, when developers can post open source software projects to collaborate. This open hardware is anything but a PR move. If others start using their designs, the servers they use in the future will be cheaper because of economies of scale.

This is laughable at best. MS is anathema to anything that isn't locked down into a licensing scheme. That the company believes (or for that matter, anyone else) that its announcement of OCP would be any kind of game changer is a joke. This is nothing more than a big PR move with MS hoping to fool most of the people most of the time, which it continues to do with its unstable, bloated OS year after year.

I do think OCP is going to remain in the realm of Web-scale organizations. The Web-scale folks run so big that every penny they can shave via a specialized design pays back in multiples. But because the designs are so specialized, I don't really see them moving en masse to the enterprise or mid market. Some tweaks may trickle down to the Dells and HPs that manufacture systems for the masses, but in my opinion OCP is about custom designs for highly specific requirements.

Doesn't that presume that this Open Compute movement will stay in the web giant realm? I would think the threat to Microsoft comes if it moves into the merely big and the midmarket data centers, at which point Microsoft needs to offer options to embrace a new hardware platform while keeping your Windows-centric app platform.

It seems like mostly a PR move to me. The kinds of companies looking at open hardware designs run massive infrastructures that emphasize inexpensive components to support massive scale. One of those inexpensive components is Linux. I think it's unlikely that a Web-scale organization will want to pay the license costs to run Windows, even if it is on open hardware. I think Windows just wants to stick its head under the halo of the "open" movement. A hardware design is an easy way to get some of that glow without making any substantial changes to way it operates.

It's good PR but it's more than that. The company has come to understand the role that open systems play, even when it feels competitive with them. And open source hardware is not a threat. Linux was part of an x86 revolution in the enterprise data center. So was Windows Server. Now the enterprise is starting to migrate its operations into the public cloud. Microsoft wants to participate in that process. Resistance, after all, might be about as successful as trying to beat back Linux.

Open Compute from what I understand is primarily a threat to proprietary hardware makers, so there might not be much to lose for Microsoft. Michael notes that Open Compute users today are Linux centric, but maybe that's the reason for Microsoft to cozy help. Will companies combine open source hardware with Windows software? What kind of hurdles would that create?

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.